Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Wednesday July 21, 2010 @11:42AM
from the gotta-start-somewhere dept.

suraj.sun writes "The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark developer Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is 'designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hopefully) future hardware.'
The latest release of Lightspark features better compatibility with YouTube videos, sound synchronization support and the ability to use fontconfig for font selection. Other changes include plug-in support for Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser and support for Firefox's out of process plug-in (OOPP) mode, which was added in version 3.6.4 of the browser."

On a feature level, for the entire browser+addons stack, I agree that that is an extremely useful feature. Sturgeon's law applies, hard, to flash and most of it deserves to be blocked.

Architecturally, though, isn't the flash renderer plugin a silly place for blacklisting/whitelisting/domain control features? The browser is responsible for issuing the HTTP requests, rendering what it can, calling plugins for what it can't, and so forth. Why should the browser download the flash blob, load the renderer, an

The browser is responsible for issuing the HTTP requests, rendering what it can, calling plugins for what it can't, and so forth. Why should the browser download the flash blob, load the renderer, and then have the renderer check a blacklist and allow or refuse rendering of the object?

Because that blob calls 800 other flash files from around the web. The biggest problem is one flash file including cross-domain other-flash. And Macromedia used to understand that and forbid it. Then, the content producers

I wish that I were more surprised by that; but then I think back to what Adobe is doing to PDFs, which are slowly growing into a script-driven monstrosity with virtually everything embedded in... Why yes, Adobe, I've always wanted to embed fucking videos in a document format designed for accurate printing...

That sounds good in theory but not everyone's a (capable) programmer. Perhaps the best feature they could add is bounties, meaning people can offer cash for someone with the necessary skillset to implement the feature they want.

The most promising aspect of open source software, even beyond being free of locked-down monopolies, is the opportunity for anyone with an interest in software to get their hands dirty and experience what it feels like to help develop a project they actually use and care about. Even if the coding experience isn't there, there may be other ways to get involved. Participating in OSS has the potential to be very gratifying, and can entice more people to consider computer

Now that open source has embraces the flash standard, no doubt Adobe will add proprietary additions so sow incompatibility.

The protentially nice thing about this howerve is that if1) it's efficient2) not buggy3) supports DRM

then it answers apple's complaints about flash and Youtube's complaints about H264. The problme for apple was that it would be insane to make your player beholden to a closed 3rd party app, espeically one from a company that hsitorically dragged it's heels in incorproating your platforms new features. Apple thrives on offering distinguishing features and adobe smothers them if they don't incorporate them.

But if the source is open apple is free to make sure it keeps up. So long as it is not as buggy as flash was.

Likewise youtube complained they could not monetize Video under H264 as well as under flash. the ability to have linking and overlays and such was required for the cash register.

Again this is now possible if this supports DRM.

One nice thing is that since apple already has a sandboxing system in both OSX and iOS, having it open source may allow them to get a tighter sandbox. No need to count on Adobe's sandbox working.

It won't, however, answer Apple's biggest reason for not wanting to support Flash.

Flash is, simply, a proprietary format that they don't have any patent control over. They want h264, which is a proprietary format controlled by a consortium they are a major member of.

Apple wants Flash dead. They don't want it open, they don't want it closed, they don't want it with cherries and whipped cream on top. They want it dead. It's something they cannot control, and therefore it must die.

If you had used flash on a mac you'd probably change your tune. Adobe have almost abandoned apple when most of their apps started on mac os. I can understand apple saying "fuck off" to adobe after the bullshit they've pulled over recent years.

Flash is, simply, a proprietary format that they don't have any patent control over. They want h264, which is a proprietary format controlled by a consortium they are a major member of.

h.264 and Flash aren't incompatible. And Apple's a minor member of that consortium with almost no patents in the game. Apple just wants the best products and doesn't want to have to depend on others to get them, and Flash is the opposite of both of those things.

Apple's browser engine? How many times does this myth have to be corrected? KHTML was a pretty complete rendering engine before Apple adopted it under the name WebKit. It was the only major free software contender to gecko, and Apple was not the first to notice it. NOKIA used it to replace gecko in their handhelds (and they sent a nice thank you letter to the khtml mailing list). Yes, Apple did contribute a lot of code, but they did not write it. And as of now, they are not the only contributors either. So webkit is a bad example for Apple's contributions - they basically forked KHTML (and the first few releases of Safari were pretty much KHTML + a few patches) and they had no choice but to maintain it as free software because KHTML was GPL.

From wikipedia: WebKit was originally derived by Apple Inc. from the Konqueror browser’s KHTML software library for use as the engine of Mac OS X’s Safari web browser and has now been further developed by individuals from the KDE project, Apple Inc., Nokia, Google, Bitstream, Torch Mobile and others.

Heck, their biggest competitor in their fastest-growing market is basing their entire web experience on Apple's browser engine, so it doesn't seem like Apple is too worried about competition there.

A couple of problems with this statement:

It's not Apple's browser engine, it's the community's. Just because Apple is a major member of that community does not mean they own the project. If anyth

How much of the current WebKit is Apple and how much is from other contributors? Does anybody actually know? I'm sure much of KHTML is gone, but the KDE (now Nokia, I guess?) people still work on it, and so does Google among others.

Sure, but in the same process they also "acquired" many KDE developers, I just don't know whether the original or current KHTML/Webkit devs are among them. Nokia does contribute to Webkit, so it stands to reason they got at least some Webkit devs via the Trolltech acquisition.

Ogg is not an "excellent product", by any means. Also, no one cares about it.

It was for a long time the best codec for low-bitrate encoding until WMA stepped up its efforts and beat it. And even so it remains an excellent codec, one with very widespread availability thanks to its use on Wikipedia and various game engines among others. Meanwhile FLAC is unquestionably the best and most popular lossless codec in existence, so even if we allowed for a second your poor argument against Ogg, with FLAC there's really no excuse whatsoever.

And WebKit, while derived from KHTML way back when, really is Apple's. Sorry.

Ogg's not a codec. Vorbis is a codec (and, in conjuction with Ogg, a widely supported one, and an excellent one), but in the context of video, original poster may have been referring to Theora, the video codec, and that one is, perhaps, a bit dubious.

Ogg is not an "excellent product", by any means. Also, no one cares about it.

If no one cares about it, why does almost every electronics vendor except for Apple support it? Of course, Ogg is just a wrapper, and the only widely supported codec used with Ogg is Vorbis (not Theora, which is not widely supported), but the simple facts of the matter would still seem to refute your second claim.

As for your first, I'm aware of one widely published criticism released by an extremely biased source, but I'm also aware of a rebuttal pointing out that that criticism assumed different prioritie

>Flash is, simply, a proprietary format that they don't have any patent control over. They want h264, which is a proprietary format controlled by a consortium they are a major member of.

I think you got the Apple v. Flash "war" mixed up with the HTML5 v Flash war...

I'm pretty sure Apple's objection to Flash on their iOS devices has more with it being an alternate development platform that they can't control and little to do with the specialized use case of video delivery. In other words, they want to mak

More like Apple would like its iOS devices judged on the performance that can be achieved when compiled code is used (*their* dev tools is GNU gcc well actually GNU Objective-C) instead of being penalized for the poor performance experienced with Adobe flash. Sure they make Xcode, but I don't know anyone who seriously uses it.

Not if the Flash is well-designed, and if it's not well-designed then the site using it will lose ranking in the search engines. I don't think Google really needs to go out of its way to index content nowadays, as if you're not in Google then you don't exist for a lot of the web's users...

By putting most of the content in searchable formats (probably XML), and probably by following some kind of standards. I mean, Flash apps can be made accessible too, but most developers don't bother. Plus, a well-designed site can have a simple version that can easily be indexed (using e.g. the sitemap XML for search engines) and a "rich" version which might be harder to index. So it's a problem that can be solved in multiple ways. At worst, the.swf could be decoded, and any text blobs within it parsed.

Unfortunately, that depends... For classic "Hey, let's try to obfuscate on top of a standard OS running on general purpose hardware and hope nobody with a clue attaches a debugger" style DRM, OSS is indeed technically incompatible. Obtain code, recompile version with locks removed, go home happy. Game over.

However, if the code is under one of the OSS licenses that allows Tivoization(GPL2, among others), and if embedded hardware controlled by the vendor comes into play, you have a very different story. Th

I seem to remember that the real problem Flash clones is that documentation is not completely free and if you read it you have to be under strong NDA for the rest of your life. This should also be why Gnash always lags behind. How did he overcome this issue? Or are we waiting for a lawsuit to strike as soon as the plugin becomes usable?

That was historically true, but is no longer the case (I believe they changed the license coincident with the Open Screen Project release). See here [adobe.com]. There are still the H.264 and On2 (as well as Nellymoser and other specific media codec) issues, but not any with open implementations of Flash itself.

I seem to remember that the real problem Flash clones is that documentation is not completely free and if you read it you have to be under strong NDA for the rest of your life. This should also be why Gnash always lags behind. How did he overcome this issue? Or are we waiting for a lawsuit to strike as soon as the plugin becomes usable?

The creator of the project trained a chimpansee to understand code, a literal code-monkey if you will or rather a code-ape to be more accurate. This code-ape then reads the Flash documentation and explains it with sign language to the project creator. Since the code-ape cannot be properly held to an NDA the project continues unencumbered by draconian laws or demonic contracts.

Gnash does not support version two of the Actionscript Virtual Machine. (Most new Flash content uses that AVM version.) Lightspark is intended to support exactly that. There are many other differences, but that's the main one.

By my count there are atleast 4 opensource flash project. Most of them seem to exist just for the developer's own benefit. Is there any analysis or review and comparison of the several open source flash clones?

Any open source Flash clone that added support for the encrypted version of the RTMP streaming protocol (which is what Hulu and others use) would be hit by a DMCA lawsuit.If Adobe doesn't do EVERYTHING it can legally do to prevent programs that can save encrypted RTMP streams (or programs that can be modified to save such streams) sites like Hulu will go to their competitor or shut down altogether.

Hell will freeze over before NBC, Fox and ABC (the owners of Hulu) will allow their content to be distributed i

I feel dirty for asking this particular question, but did they make some change to mafia wars that requires flash? It's been some time since I played it (and I have no intention of starting up again regardless of your answer, I just want to know how well-informed you are in this case)

The interstitial stupidity is a part of the reason I stopped playing those retarded games. the fact that they're lame had something to do with it too. Now I'm playing another lame game without any added stupidity called dragon's call [gamedp.com].

Flash Player is a bloated slow pig of a program. Windows users need a Flash Player alternative just as much as Linux users do.

So when I hear about a release, I look for the Standalone EXE player, which unfortunately doesn't exist.

I also wonder how this compares to Gnash. I've tested out Gnash, and it crashed on several SWF files I played through the program on Windows. Gnash also obviously wasn't designed at all to run on Windows, since it is missing the essential feature of Drag-Drop files onto the standalone player window.

The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:

lex = flexyacc = bisonsh = bashUNIX = LINUXvi = vim

To name just a few.

So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.

Not even the first programmers editor, but as a derivative of TECO, it could be argued to be the oldest still-widely-used text editor (with vi as a possible alternative, depending on how you measure the "release date"). Oh, and it couldn't "steal Vi's crown" at anything, because both were in development at about the same time. As for making text editing "more difficult", the state of the art at that time was TECO, and both vi and emacs were big improvements over that.

It still surprises me that this came from the open source community AND that to this day no commercial OS has anything close.

It's simple: proprietary software places want to have control over everything. They don't want to be just another program on your desktop, they want to take it over with buttons everywhere on your desktop and start menu, their corporation name on your start menu (instead of just putting their progr

It's not that it doesn't exist, it's more that they took the brute force approach to solving it. A lot of it is distributed on CD/DVD, just put everything on the disc. Even digital downloads now rather bloat their installers than deal with it, for example because you might not be online anymore when you try to install it or you're running it from a different PC. They just assume you have the bandwidth, if not get the boxed/burned version.

Well Windows apps did for a while have the DLL hell issue. Not sure if they still do.

Er, yeah. That ceased being a real issue back around the 1997-98 timeframe.

But more important I think is the unified package distribution system. packagekit for gnome for example... I only need to get one notice from it that I have software updates. Whereas go to any presentation running a Windows laptop and you'll inevitably see at least one software update, though sometimes several from different apps during the pres

Er, yeah. That ceased being a real issue back around the 1997-98 timeframe.

Really?

The "platform" exists, it's called Windows Update.

I see, you work at Microsoft.

You can absolutely do batch and non-interactive installs with MSI (and other third-party Windows installation systems). Active Directory and Group Policy can do software distribution for anything that's an MSI, and there are third-party solutions for apps without MSI installers.

Packaging system has nothing to do with non-interactive installation. The fact that interactive installers exist, just shows how idiotic the whole Windows software distribution model is.

Then Windows users have strange definition of a "problem". Every time one has to combine products that use incompatible versions of libraries, havoc ensues unless each products drags absolutely everything with itself. It became easier for software vendors to distribute trivial programs as 1G packages, however users still have to deal with incompatibilities and duplication of everything at runtime.

I think you need to complain to the poster I was replying to. He was the one using automated installation as an example of why a packaging system is good.

You're just being silly there. Of course that approach would never work. People wouldn't go for it and Microsoft wouldn't want to deal with the hassle. The approach is just what the OSS people did with yum for example. Provide a software updater that others can hook into.

The practical difference between them installing some sort of.repo equivalent, and special updater apps, is not significant. The end result (timely updates) is the same.

Only because libraries are now are either Microsoft products, or everything is tied to the executables -- they can just as well be statically linked now.

Er, yeah, that's kind of the point. The solution to dependency hell is a properly controlled set of stable, binary compatible (forwards and backwards) base libraries, and standardised locations for third parties to install their own.

My understanding is that Flash has an open specification, just like PDF. So it's not the format that's proprietary, only most of the software that uses the format. This was a problem with PDF too for a long time, but now there's tons of both Free and non-Free tools for both creating and viewing PDF files.

As long as the spec is open, there's no problem; anyone can create compatible software. The problem is usually that it takes a lot longer for other people (especially F/OSS writers) to do it than the com

One of the big problems in Linux is Flash support. For better or worse, Flash is needed to view a lot of websites, most notably Youtube. An open-source flash player promotes Linux on the desktop, by making it so that users can do all the same things in Linux that they currently do in Windows.

You're not going to get people to switch to Linux by making it impossible to do all the things they do in Windows. However, if you can make it even easier to do things in Linux that they currently do in Windows, or a